Winter driving

The weather here in Ohio has been positively miserable for the last couple of days. With my work, I'm required to be at work regardless of road conditions. No biggie, I typically don't mind driving in adverse conditions. Fortunately, the Focus seems to handle admirably on snow and ice (with the requisite set of Blizzak snow tires, of course). I can't really say that it handles better than any car I've ever driven in the snow, because quite frankly, its pretty much the only car I've ever driven in the winter. However, the car is just so predictable and controllable on snow covered roads. Obviously, the Focus floats (like most small cars do) and tracks on packed ice and snow, but its never out of control.

The things that make the car less than desirable to drive in the winter are all things of my doing. The biggest thing is the reduced ground clearance from being almost 2.5" lower than a standard Focus. I can hear snow scraping underneath the car as I drive along, and get an occasional thud from hitting a chunk of packed snow. If I were doing another daily driver Focus, I would probably aim for an SVT suspension set up on the car. It would lower the car just slightly, but more importantly, it would help resist some of the slop that the stock suspension allows for the consumer who wants to make sure their texting doesn't get disrupted. The other part that makes the car a little bit difficult to drive in the winter is the larger throttle body that I installed. The aftermarket, in an attempt to make the car respond quicker to throttle inputs did two things; they turned the wedge-shaped plastic throttle plate into a flat brass plate, and they put a softer spring on the plate return. As a result, just a light brush of the accelerator pedal flips the flat plate wide open. However, aside from the expected difficulty of retaining traction on snow/ice with a throttle thats either shut or nearly wide open, the throttle seems to stick on extremely wet, cold days. So I'll be cruising along, behind someone doing, say 25, then my car starts to slow a little bit, so I have to give it a bit of gas to keep moving at a constant speed. I'll step on the gas, and the pedal won't move, so I'll push a little harder and then, bam! we're wide open and about to hit the car in front of us. The trick is to stay a gear or two lower, which requires significant throttle input to stay at that speed.

Anyhow, I post this primarily to extoll the virtues of the Focus. Most people would say, "Seth, you should really get a Jeep since you have to be out so early in the winter". Fie on them! I drove my lowered front wheel drive Focus to work last spring in one of the worst winter storms I can remember. Of course, it happened on a weekend, so I left at 4:30 AM to be at work by 6. US-30 had not been plowed in at least 12 hours, and there was probably 8 inches of snow on all lanes. About every mile, there were State Highway patrol cars sitting along the road with their lights on (which probably meant that the road was closed, but I had to be at work, so I didn't care). There were a number of vehicles spun off into the median (shockingly enough, a few Jeeps). I knew I had to keep my momentum up, so I drove between 30 and 40 MPH the whole way to work. I made it by 5:30 (the next person from my department to show up didn't show up until 6:30). After work, the roads had been plowed..well, all except our allotment. I got stuck, in the cul de sac 20 feet from my garage, on my way home from work. Fortunately, I backed up, revved up, dumped the clutch and pushed through the last little bit of snow and into the garage.

One of my co-workers (who used to drive a Focus) traded in for a big F150 and is always talking about how much better he feels about driving in the winter now that he has something that is "suited to it". I just remember that I spend $250 on snow tires, and saved $20,000 on a new truck.